Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
It is usually called formatting the drive and reinstalling.
My current laptop is running the latest release 44 of Fedora. That install dates back to version 26 which was something like 9 or 10 years ago, can't remember the exact year. That install migrated from an ssd on a laptop to an nvme on another laptop and then moved to a larger nvme drive. I never had any breakage really. The only problem I ever had on this laptop/install is that sometimes after several long multidays sleep/wake up/sleep/wake-up cycles sound going to a bluetooth device may start having shorts stutter every 10 to 20s that is solved by a reboot. I could probably solve that by restarting pipewire and/or ubloading/reloading a bluetooth module but it doean't happen frequently enough for me to investigate further. And it is nowhere as bad as what sometimes happens on my corporate windows 11 laptop.[1]
Other computer of mine, the "gaming console", is running bazzite, an immutable variant of Fedora dedicated to gaming. Being immutable there is very little breakage possible: if you happened to had an issue with an update you could just boot from the prior version image (not happened in 3 years).
My wife is using similar system with another immutable variant of Fedora called bluefin. It actually started its life as my own secondary laptop when I explored immutable distros under aurora (same base as bluefin but with kde desktop instead of gnome). Migrating from Aurora to Bluefin just involved rebasing image from one distro to another without having to do anything with the user data. All in all pretty robust and painless.
[1] OTOH the sound stack of the windows 11 running on my company issued laptop has had many hiccups to the point some usb or bluetooth devices looks to simoly disappear on a regular basis. A number of times I completely lost the complete sound stack in a middle.of a teams call. I could plug and unplung usb audio devices, bluetooth, usb or jack headsets to no avail. Only rebooting the laptop would make sound work again.I also experience absurd slowness of start menu and even random freezes of explorer windows from time to time on a very lightly used laptop as most of the stuff I do is done on an azure cloud windows desktop (don't get me started on this one, feels like using a raspberry pi 3) via rdp.
No it isn't. That was true maybe 20 years ago. Most distros now just work. If something isn't working, the internet solves most of the problems.
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.